Revelio Labs’ Product-First Culture: Building Enterprise Software with a Team of 51 Engineers
When most enterprise software companies scale, they eventually shift focus from product development to sales and marketing. But Revelio Labs has taken a different approach. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Ben Zweig revealed how they’ve maintained a product-first culture even as they’ve grown to serve major enterprise clients.
“Right now there’s, I think, 55 people in the company and only four people don’t write code. Everyone’s really hands on,” Ben explains. This isn’t just an interesting statistic – it’s a deliberate strategy that reflects their approach to building enterprise software.
The decision to maintain such a heavily technical team stems from Revelio Labs’ core mission: creating a Bloomberg terminal for workforce data. This requires solving complex technical challenges in data collection, analysis, and visualization: “We have a very big data science team that analyzes the natural language and tries to create taxonomies and disambiguate entities and adjust for sampling bias and lags in reporting and all sorts of problems that come up.”
Their technical focus has helped them build credibility with sophisticated clients. As Ben notes: “We have a lot of data that companies themselves don’t have. We have a better sense of the skills that people have and where they go, when they leave and where they come from and the activities people do and so much of that.”
This approach has shaped several key aspects of their organization:
Flat Culture
Despite serving enterprise clients, Revelio Labs maintains what Ben describes as “a pretty flat culture.” This structure enables rapid decision-making and keeps the focus on product development rather than organizational hierarchy.
Problem-First Development
Rather than building features for their roadmap, they focus on solving real customer problems. “These end users, they are very often familiar with their sets of problems,” Ben explains. “Sometimes they’ll just come to us and they’ll say, oh, here are five challenges I have in my role. And we’ll say, okay, we can basically solve one, two, three, and four.”
Data Science at the Core
The company has invested heavily in data science capabilities, recognizing that their competitive advantage comes from their ability to process and analyze complex workforce data. This technical foundation helps them maintain credibility with sophisticated clients who understand data.
Their product-first approach has even influenced their media strategy. When challenged by Meta over their analysis of hiring trends, they didn’t retreat to PR statements. Instead, Ben shares: “We kind of went back and did a more thorough analysis and we tried to slice and dice it in tons of different ways and at the end of the day, we had the same pattern.”
Looking ahead, Revelio Labs plans to tackle even bigger technical challenges. As Ben explains: “We’d like to come into a company and say, we can incorporate your own data and the external data and give you the best of both worlds and still be able to enable benchmarking across companies.”
This vision requires solving complex problems around data privacy, integrations, and abstractions. As Ben notes: “That’s a big to do because taking in actually, like, first party HR data, there’s a lot to do with privacy, there’s a lot of integrations to do. Every company is a little different, so we need to build abstractions and integrations.”
Their experience offers several key lessons for B2B founders:
- Technical excellence can be a sustainable competitive advantage in enterprise markets
- Product-first cultures can scale if you’re deliberate about maintaining them
- Complex technical challenges often require keeping engineering at the center of your organization
- Flat organizational structures can help maintain focus on product development
Revelio Labs’ approach suggests that the conventional wisdom about enterprise software companies needing to shift focus from product to sales might be wrong – at least for companies solving sufficiently complex technical problems. By maintaining their focus on technical excellence, they’ve built a unique position in the market that would be difficult for sales-first organizations to replicate.
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